The New York Review of Books engagement report
@nybooks - 2.1M followers on X
Measured over 121 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 1, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 11 interactions against 2.1M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 121 original posts, its engagement rate beats 13% of 3,899 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 9.4K times each, and 0.117% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.457% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 4.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on almost every day in the window. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Monday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 121 posts sampled, 98% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 284 interactions, about 26x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #euripides, #literature, #austen.
Measured over 121 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on September 1, 2026. Recurring tags: #euripides, #literature, #austen.
Compared with accounts its own size
The New York Review of Books's engagement rate beats 13% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,899 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 10 of 10)). A percentile is spread evenly by construction, so 50 really is the middle of that group and 90 really is its top tenth.
On engagement per impression rather than per follower it beats 10% of the same group. When those two numbers disagree, the gap is about how far its posts travel rather than how people react to them.
Where this sits in the catalog
At 0.001%, The New York Review of Books sits below the 10th percentile of the 37,701 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the bottom 25% band, which runs below 0.012%.
Show the percentile table
| Percentile | Engagement rate |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 0.002% |
| 25th percentile | 0.012% |
| 50th percentile | 0.081% |
| 75th percentile | 0.439% |
| 90th percentile | 2.10% |
| 99th percentile | 156.3% |
This ruler is the whole measured catalog, not a size-matched group: it shows where the raw rate falls across every account we can measure, all of which are large. For a like-for-like comparison, read the size-band percentile above instead. See how the bands are built
Posting timing
This account posts most often around 15:00 UTC, and Monday is its busiest day of the week. The bars below are the catalog-wide pattern, with this account's own busiest slot marked. They do not show how this account performs at each hour: we keep one aggregate per account, not one per hour, so that measurement does not exist in our data.
Show engagement by hour posted, utc as a table
| Hour (UTC) | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 UTC | -1% | 53K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 53K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 52K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 55K |
| 04:00 UTC | -6% | 44K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 43K |
| 06:00 UTC | -4% | 50K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 54K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 63K |
| 09:00 UTC | -3% | 72K |
| 10:00 UTC | -2% | 75K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 81K |
| 12:00 UTC | -2% | 90K |
| 13:00 UTC | -2% | 98K |
| 14:00 UTC | -3% | 101K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 105K |
| 16:00 UTC | -4% | 102K |
| 17:00 UTC | -3% | 95K |
| 18:00 UTC | -1% | 88K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 83K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 77K |
| 21:00 UTC | -1% | 69K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 60K |
| 23:00 UTC | -2% | 53K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +5% | 238K |
| Monday | 0% | 302K |
| Tuesday | -3% | 302K |
| Wednesday | -1% | 257K |
| Thursday | -2% | 250K |
| Friday | -3% | 259K |
| Saturday | +3% | 233K |
Best tweets
- Aug 16, 202626x their median
"Like all ingenues, she is blonde and has precisely two enemies" I reviewed Maddie's Secret for the NYRB: https://t.co/jAF4c54mHl
- Aug 21, 202612x their median
“We don’t want to lose Socratic intellectualism. It’s an ethical theory worth considering that gets obscured with the image of Socrates as a skeptic.” —@AgnesCallard, in conversation with Merve Emre https://t.co/56iHZwjIQW
- Aug 25, 202611x their median
After reading Wolfgang Koeppen’s novels, “I wondered what on earth had just happened to me; it seemed I’d been tuned, sharpened, elasticized—reformulated with better neurons.” —Deborah Eisenberg https://t.co/Z8oqUg1iIz
- Aug 25, 20268.4x their median
Yiyun Li on Qian Zhongshu’s satirical masterpiece, Fortress Besieged https://t.co/CWlgtAcQlh
- Jul 30, 20268.0x their median
Our 8/20 issue is now online, with @DAMendelsohnNYC on the Odyssey, Michael Greenberg on the DSA, @OfficialMDanner on Trump in decline, @lmlauramarsh on John Lanchester, @DavidCole_Gtown on the Supreme Court’s power grab, a poem by Anne Carson & much more. https://t.co/9jikpQF6Hr
- Aug 10, 20267.9x their median
For @nybooks, on the road to the NYC rent freeze and what else is possible for a tenant movement adjusting to formal power. Many thanks to @elusivecorporal for edits, and to @caaav, @TenantBloc, @CASAbronx for allowing me a peek into their organizing ❤️🔥 https://t.co/CBBs9fHpn1
- Aug 7, 20267.8x their median
Attention #literature lovers! Starting 2 Sept I’ll be leading the fourth season of the @nybooks Seminars, this one a five-part series on the theme of “Unrequited Love,” from #Euripides to #Proust (via #Dante, #Goethe, #Austen, #Maugham). Signup info ⬇️ https://t.co/4WyN8YqnBR
- Aug 29, 20264.4x their median
Ever had an unrequited love? So did the ancients! On Sept 2 join Daniel Mendelsohn (@DAMendelsohnNYC) for a four-part seminar on mismatched love affairs in the world of Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Virgil, and more. https://t.co/aj7nVOHC5G
- Aug 17, 20263.7x their median
Daniel M. Lavery (@daniel_m_lavery) on John Early’s ingenue in Maddie’s Secret https://t.co/BvWMLZUHet
- Aug 31, 20263.5x their median
“Ironically, as I’ve developed a deeper relationship with Iran and more expertise about the country, it has become riskier for me to return.” —Nahid Siamdoust, interviewed by Janhavi Munde https://t.co/m7cuCCn4ew
Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.
Recurring topics
The most frequent hashtags in the sampled posts. They describe what this account writes about; they are not a performance signal, and the catalog-wide breakdown on the hub shows how little hashtag count moves.
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Reading these numbers
A typical post picks up 11 interactions against 2.1M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 121 original posts, its engagement rate beats 13% of 3,899 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 9.4K times each, and 0.117% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.457% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 4.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on almost every day in the window. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Monday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 121 posts sampled, 98% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 284 interactions, about 26x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #euripides, #literature, #austen.
- What is The New York Review of Books's engagement rate on X?
- The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) has an engagement rate of 0.001%, based on the median interactions across 121 original posts from the last 30 days against 2,054,823 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.001%, The New York Review of Books sits below the 10th percentile of the 37,701 accounts in this comparison. Those comparison accounts are all large ones, because our scanning cadence is weighted towards big accounts, so this is a ranking among peers of similar scale rather than a ranking across X.
- Does @nybooks have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 13% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,899 accounts), which puts it in the bottom quarter for its size group. Ranking inside a size band matters because engagement rate falls as accounts grow, so a raw rate would mostly re-measure the follower count. It is a starting point for a look at follower quality, not a verdict on it.
- When does @nybooks post?
- Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Monday is its busiest day, at roughly 4.43 posts per day across the measured window.